B. During the Business Impact Assessment phase, you must identify the business priorities of

In the United States, trademarks are granted for an initial period of 10 years and may be renewed for successive 10-year periods. Patents Patents protect the intellectual property rights of inventors. They provide a period of 20 years during which the inventor is granted exclusive rights to use the invention whether directly or via licensing agreements. At the end of the patent exclusivity period, the invention is then in the public domain available for anyone to use. There are three main requirements for a patent: The invention must be new. Inventions are only patentable if they are original ideas. The invention must be useful. It must actually work and accomplish some sort of task. The invention must be non-obvious. You could not, for example, obtain a patent for your idea to use a drinking cup to collect rainwater. This is an obvious solution. You might, however, be able to patent a specially designed cup that optimizes the amount of rainwater collected while minimizing evaporation. In the technology field, patents have long been used to protect hardware devices and manu- facturing processes. There is plenty of precedent on the side of inventors in those areas. Recent patents have also been issued covering software programs and similar mechanisms, but the jury’s still out on whether these patents will hold up to the scrutiny of the courts. One high-profile case involved Amazon.com’s patent on the “One-Click Shop- ping” e-commerce methodology. Amazon.com claims that its patent grants the company exclusive rights to use this technique. Arguments against this claim revolve around the novelty and non-obviousness requirements of patent law. Trade Secrets Many companies have intellectual property that is absolutely critical to their business and would cause significant damage if it were disclosed to competitors andor the public—in other words, trade secrets. We previously mentioned two examples of this type of information from popular culture—the secret formula for Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “secret blend of herbs and spices.” Other examples are plentiful—a manufacturing company may wish to keep secret a certain manufacturing process that only a few key employees fully understand, or a statistical analysis company might wish to safeguard an advanced model developed for in-house use. Two of the previously discussed intellectual property tools—copyrights and patents—could be used to protect this type of information, but with two major disadvantages: Filing a copyright or patent application requires that you publicly disclose the details of your work or invention. This automatically removes the “secret” nature of your property and may harm your firm by removing the mystique surrounding a product or by allowing unscrupulous competitors to copy your property in violation of international intellectual property laws. Copyrights and patents both provide protection for a limited period of time. Once your legal protection expires, other firms are free to use your work at will and they have all the details from the public disclosure you made during the application process. There actually isn’t much of an official process regarding trade secrets—by their nature you don’t register them with anyone. You simply must implement adequate controls within your organization to ensure that only authorized personnel who need to know the secrets have access to them in the course of their duties. You must also ensure that anyone who does have this type of access is bound by a nondisclosure agreement NDA or other legal document that prohibits them from sharing the information with others and provides pen- alties for violation of the agreement. It is important to ensure that the agreement lasts for the maximum period permitted by law. Trade secret protection is one of the best ways to protect computer software. As discussed in the previous section, patent law does not provide adequate protection for computer software products. Copyright law only protects the actual text of the source code and doesn’t prohibit others from rewriting your code in a different form and accomplishing the same objective. If you treat your source code as a trade secret, it keeps it out of the hands of your competitors in the first place. This is the technique used by large software development companies like Microsoft to protect their core base of intellectual property. Economic Espionage Act of 1996 Trade secrets are very often the crown jewels of major corporations, and the United States gov- ernment recognized the importance of protecting this type of intellectual property when Con- gress enacted the Economic Espionage Act of 1996. This law has two major provisions: Anyone found guilty of stealing trade secrets from a U.S. corporation with the intention of benefiting a foreign government or agent may be fined up to 500,000 and imprisoned for up to 15 years. Anyone found guilty of stealing trade secrets under other circumstances may be fined up to 250,000 and imprisoned for up to 10 years. The terms of the Economic Espionage Act give true teeth to the intellectual property rights of trade secret owners. Enforcement of this law requires that companies take adequate steps to ensure that their trade secrets are well protected and not accidentally placed into the public domain.